I generally hate procrastination, especially when I do it. But now and then it works in my favor. In this case, I am catching up on emails from the last couple of months, and was reading a Motley Fool article. They mention one of their Hidden Gems picks (for free!) and I go to look into it, seeing that it just tanked from panic selling the day before. The pick is Dynamic Materials Corp. (BOOM). I have made money more often than not from following Foolish advise, and if I were up enough to take a higher risk tolerance I would buy immediately rather than setting a watch for drops and limit buy a little lower than Friday’s 14.27% drop.
Archive for the ‘TANSTAAFL’ Category
I Like That Boom Boom BOOM
Saturday, March 6th, 2010Hiiiiiya!
Thursday, December 17th, 2009Getting That Y2K Feeling Again
Tuesday, November 24th, 2009While the anticipated disasters expected in 2000 did not occur, the burst of the tech bubble did occur that year (not much of a coincidence if you look at the roots of the IT industry). Seeing this headline
in my in box today gave me the same sinking feeling my Macromedia stock did in 2000, only this time I can see it coming.
What Some Stock Newsletters Would Do Otherwise
Wednesday, June 17th, 2009
Would You Like Brains with That?
Sunday, June 14th, 2009Quote from a newsletter offer that actually had me interested until I got to this line:
But you can get it all for free for only $29.95.
me2everyone Ups the Ante
Friday, June 12th, 2009me2everyone is a pre-launch social networking site that is using what has made social networking popular to be popular: viral marketing. But they are doing it with a twist, giving away stock in the company to the first 500,000 members. They started by giving away 1000 shares, then scaled back to 100. Now they have gone to 2000 shares for the final push. Go to http://www.me2everyone.com/452531 to learn more. Or see my post about this last month.
Foolishly Cheap
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009Motley Fool has a good article about shopping cheap stocks. It is one of those articles that remind me when reading financial articles, always read the whole thing before doing anything about it.
The article starts with a very mechanical approach to finding the cheapest stock of 1999. I love mechanical approaches as they tickle my lazy side. My cheap side has been burnt enough from being too lazy that I’ve learned that mechanics are never enough.
Anyway, while this selection method works great for the first stock, it doesn’t hold consistent down the line. The dart in action once again.
The one thing I don’t like about the article is where they have a table of stocks picked with the mechanical approach that shows an average upside of 107% over 5 years of picks. Firstly, that is way too narrow of a sampling to be reliable, and secondly the star example of the article throws the average so far off that if it wasn’t there, you’d be just as well off with a money market fund. I don’t think it was the author’s intention to promote following the approach blindly, but I think it did merit more comment on why profits may be smaller than they appear.